The first time you glance at this photo, it looks like a pretty mundane mountain landscape. A craggy rock face. Snow-dusted peaks in the distance. A valley below. All fairly standard stuff.
But look closer at the right-hand side of the picture. Curled up together on a ledge, their grey spotted coats blending beautifully into the stone, are two snow leopard cubs. If there were ever a perfect demonstration of how good nature is at camouflage, this is it.
Appropriately titled Hidden in Plain Sight, this endearing picture was taken by wildlife photographer and filmmaker Awais Ali Sheikh near Ghalapan village in Gilgit-Baltistan, northern Pakistan. It's now won him the Pure Nature – Land category of the OurNature Environmental Photo & Video Award.
“Perfectly camouflaged in their rugged habitat, [the cubs] are almost invisible at first glance, their spotted coats blending seamlessly into the surrounding stone,” Sheikh explains. “Only after a few moments does the mountain reveal its secret.”
Finding them at all was no mean feat, as snow leopards are famously elusive. They live in remote, high mountain ranges across Central and South Asia, and their camouflage is so effective they’re known as the “ghosts of the mountains”. Seeing one is rare. Seeing two together is rarer still.
Given that, it would have been understandable if Sheikh – who was born and raised in Pakistan and is now based in Portugal – had wanted to fill the frame with them. Instead, happily, he made the creative decision to pull back and show them as a tiny part of a vast landscape.
This allows us to get involved in the challenge of spotting a snow leopard ourselves, making the picture feel wonderfully immersive.
The photograph was captured by a DJI Mavic 4 Pro drone, using its main Hasselblad camera, which has a 28mm-equivalent field of view. The settings were 1/640sec at f/2.8 and ISO 100, set manually. The shot was taken on February 12, in the depths of the Himalayan winter, around 3,000m above sea level.
For me, what makes the picture so powerful is how the camera was pointed almost perfectly level, giving the feel of a view from a neighbouring ridge rather than a typical overhead drone shot.
The Our Nature Environmental Photo & Video Award is an annual competition that showcases the most inspirational nature and environmental photography from around the world. See more winning work in the Winners' Gallery.
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